Daily Inspiration: Meet Justin Jackson

Today we’d like to introduce you to Justin Jackson.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I grew up in Los Angeles — South Central, with school in Culver City. Music was always somewhere in the room. My brother used to say he knew early on that I’d end up working with it. I didn’t fully understand what he meant at the time, but looking back it feels less like a prediction and more like he was just paying attention to something I hadn’t named yet.

I didn’t really step into music as my own until my adult years. I started my first mixtape at 20 and finished it at 25. That five-year process quietly rewired how I understood myself creatively — it stopped being about making songs and started being about building worlds. Emotional, immersive worlds where sound could hold things that language sometimes can’t. Since then I’ve been deepening that practice through layered mixes, original compositions, and field recordings, following threads of vulnerability, transformation, healing, and what I’ve come to call cascades of reverence.

A lot of where I am today comes from the people closest to me. The love and support I’ve received gave me the confidence to keep going inward — to explore new emotional and sonic territory without feeling like I had to stay inside genre or expectation. That freedom didn’t come from nowhere. It came from feeling held.

Right now I’m finishing my debut album, due within the next year, and continuing to build the world around my mixes and radio work — including my series Acts of Reverence. For me, music has become a space for shedding skin. For reflection. For creating openings — in myself first, and hopefully in whoever is listening too.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not even close to smooth. It’s been turbulent — full of self-doubt, creative blocks, and spirals that didn’t always have a clear way out. But those same stretches produced some of the most pivotal breakthroughs and the deepest knowledge I’ve gained about myself and my work.

A big part of the early struggle was the story I was telling myself about what I needed in order to create. Funding, equipment, the right conditions, the right circumstances. I kept waiting for things to align externally before I felt permission to go inward. What I eventually learned — and it took time — is that none of that was the real barrier. The real barrier was vulnerability. It was learning to break down the walls I’d built and actually let the work come from somewhere honest.

Getting to that place was uncomfortable. But that discomfort was the door. On the other side of it was clarity, and the kind of growth that doesn’t leave.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
jetty is my musical project — a space where sound becomes a vessel for vulnerability, transformation, and shedding skin. The work moves between layered mixes, original compositions, field recordings, and immersive sonic environments, pulling from downtempo, experimental, ambient, baile funk, electronic, cumbia, jazz, gospel, footwork, and wherever else the feeling leads. At the center of it is what I call cascades of reverence — moments where rhythm, texture, and spirit stop being separate things and just flow, resonating somewhere deeper than the ear.

What drives the work isn’t genre. It’s intention. I’m less interested in staying inside boundaries and more interested in building experiences that feel transformative, intimate, and alive — environments you move through rather than music you simply hear. Whether I’m crafting a mix, producing a track, or layering field recordings, the goal is the same: make the listener feel like they’ve entered something living.

What I’m most proud of is learning to trust the vision fully. I started my first mixtape at 20 and finished it at 25 — five years that taught me patience, deepened my relationship with creativity, and showed me what it means to let a world develop on its own time. Right now I’m finishing my debut album while continuing to expand Acts of Reverence, my radio and mix series, which has grown into one of the most important extensions of everything jetty is becoming.

What do you like and dislike about the city?
What I love most about Los Angeles is how expansive it is — not just geographically, but humanly. You can meet people from every corner of the world here, and there’s a constant current of creativity and collaboration running underneath everything. Every neighborhood carries its own energy, its own culture, its own history. That layered quality has deeply shaped the way I think about music and community — the idea that many worlds can exist alongside each other and inform each other without flattening into one.

What I like least is the surface. The city can pull people into a kind of performance — image-driven, fast-moving, more about being seen than being real. I don’t think that’s native to LA itself. It’s more what happens when people arrive chasing what the city represents and lose themselves in the chase. The inauthentic interactions and shallow connections that come out of that aren’t unique to here, but they’re concentrated in a way that can be hard to move through. You have to know what you’re rooted in, or the pace of this place will decide that for you.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jetty.cargo.site
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jettyjap?igsh=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@jetty333?si=mWVQZMewgq4efctn
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/justinjackson-3?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0nCxyZ3sKzpqelxSfGTo3e?si=A0-D601rQYyP0yrl9XNhNg

Image Credits
Photo with purple shirt:
Photography: Ward & Kweskin
Makeup: Zenia Jagger
Hairstylist: Rachel Lee

Red Photo: Remy Detournay

Photo in overalls: Ellie Wessel

Photo in dj booth: Ellie Wessel